Vending machines are well known and have existed since the late 1880s. The first vending machines were rudimentary devices primarily designed to dispense cigarettes and postcards. Modern vending machines are employed to store and dispense a vast array of merchandise and/or offer various services in response to a customer request accompanied by appropriate payment. Examples of merchandise dispensed by such machines include drinks, candy, frozen deserts, snacks, video tapes and children's toys. Examples of services offered include automated car washes, portrait photographs, laundry machines, television viewing and blood pressure monitoring.
Many entrepreneurs are attracted to the basic concept of selling products and services using a vending machine. Vending machines are generally considered to have significant advantages over traditional merchandising. Specifically, vending machines enable the automated sale of merchandise and services at unconventional locations and times, and they do not require sales personnel.
Although the basic advantages of vending machines are significant, prior art vending machines have several significant disadvantages when compared to traditional merchandising, particularly relating to inventory control and pricing. A first disadvantage is the difficulty of maintaining an inventory of perishable items. A second disadvantage is the difficulty of selling or "turning over" an inventory of low demand items and services or items with inferior quality. Although some vending machine suppliers offer to buy back inventory from operators who no longer want to sell certain products, such suppliers often fail to live up to their offer when an operator tries to exercise this option.
There have been many attempts at addressing the inventory problems of vending machines, including methods for determining what products and services are the most popular, what are the appropriate times to re-stock vending machine items and in what quantities. The solutions include methods and systems that enable vending machine operators to remotely monitor inventory and remotely retrieve sales data. Other solutions have been proposed in the forms of accounting software and bar code readers that detect the expiration dates of vending machine items. Further solutions are disclosed in commonly-owned, co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/012,163 entitled "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AUTOMATICALLY VENDING A COMBINATION OF PRODUCTS" filed on Jan. 22, 1998 in the name of Daniel E. Tedesco, James A. Jorasch, Jay S. Walker and Robert R. Lech and commonly-owned, co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/947,798 entitled "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR DYNAMICALLY MANAGING VENDING MACHINE INVENTORY PRICES" filed on Oct. 9, 1997 in the name of Daniel E. Tedesco, James A. Jorasch and Robert R. Lech, both of which are incorporated herein by reference.
Examples of vending machine patent prior art that attempt to solve the problems identified above include: U.S. Pat. No. 4,412,292, entitled "System for the Remote Monitoring of Vending Machines;" U.S. Pat. No. 4,654,800, entitled "Control and Monitoring Apparatus for Vending Machines;" U.S. Pat. No. 5,091,713, entitled "Inventory, Cash, Security, and Maintenance Control Apparatus and Method for a Plurality of Remote Vending Machines;" U.S. Pat. No. 5,367,452, entitled "Mobile Merchandising Business Management System which Provides Comprehensive Support Services for Transportable Business Operations;" and U.S. Pat. No. 4,282,575, entitled "Control and Monitoring Apparatus for Vending Machines." These inventions generally disclose remote monitoring systems, currency control systems, and data collection systems designed to address shortcomings of prior art vending devices.
Non-patent prior art includes VendMaster's software product entitled "Windows for Vending PRO with Inventory." This product enables a vending machine operator to report and analyze various historical sales data. VendMaster's product is intended to enhance a vending machine operator's ability to identify high-demand inventory, determine preferable times to stock the machine and calculate suggested prices.
These solutions fail to adequately address certain shortcomings of present vending machines. Specifically, the prior art fails to provide adequate solutions to the problem of satisfying customer demand when a desired product or service is unavailable. Using the prior art solutions, an operator may use collected supply and demand data to help determine suitable alternate products, but the fact that operators must manually ratify and implement the decisions renders these solutions burdensome, inaccurate and inefficient. These solutions are inefficient because human decisions and the implementations of those decisions are not dynamically responsive to real-time market pressures. They are delayed until the operator analyzes supply and demand data, arrives at a decision, and adjusts the machine accordingly.
A need therefore exists for a method and apparatus that monitors demand of a vending machine inventory and that dynamically and automatically determines substitute products or services to offer in order to increase a vending machine's profitability.
Accordingly, the shortcomings associated with the related art have heretofore not been adequately addressed. The present invention addresses such problems by providing methods and apparatus that have not previously been proposed.